Ask HN: Your Non-Glorious Startup Success

[johnsto19]

Most startup success stories I read about involve seemingly Hollywood scripted stories about how the founders ended up where they are today.

I wonder though, do I only read stories like that because people only write about the interesting startup stories, or is there some merit to the fact that you really have to go against the grain and shake up the world to do something big?

I am curious to hear your story if you have started a successful company that had a seemingly boring road to success.

Edit: successful means the founders got rich enough to not have to work anymore and live an upper class American lifestyle. Although if you have a startup and are not quite at this point, I would still love to hear it.

[SabrinaDent]

Generally on HN I think the working definition of a "successful" startup is "you're making buckets of money, you have instant geek cred, TechCrunch is your bitch and Google is on the phone." The number of glamorous startups that attain this is statistically small. Most profitable startups settle into being "lifestyle businesses" and get no glory at all. Personally, I think that level of success is under-rated; there's a lot to be said to owning your own shop, getting to do something you love and love to grow every day, and supporting your family with your sweat equity.

[ahoyhere → SabrinaDent]

I absolutely agree. To which I'd add: what you described as under-rated doesn't even have to be the limit for "outsiders" who don't aspire to the HN ideal.

37Signals is, by the definition of HNers, a lifestyle business… and they're absolutely rolling in money and prestige.

Personally, I think we should rebrand "lifestyle business" as "profitable business."

[pmichaud]

I don't have to work anymore, and it wasn't glorious at all.

http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/how-i-retired-at-age-25/

http://techzinglive.com/page/187/techzing-38-pete-michaud-re...

http://techzinglive.com/page/496/81-tz-panel-pete-michaud-ro...

[guynamedloren → pmichaud]

"...it turned out that the stress of figuring out how to make ends meet was better than the stress of a dead end contract sapping my life and creativity away." Talk about making lemonade out of lemons! Sounds like a swift kick in the ass is all you needed. Congrats on your successes!

[cheae → pmichaud]

Its not dull, inspiring for me atleast. I am also travelling in a similar path. Sometimes feel awkward explaining about my company to ordinary folks. (Their strange, doubtful look..)

[cmer]

I think my story fits in that category. I started Defensio a few years ago, bootstrapped along the way and sold it to a publicly traded company for a fair chunk of money. It is still thriving today.

I think our story, although not Facebook-famous, is interesting because I believe we significantly improved the web without anybody knowing it.

We started Defensio when we found out that many people were dissatisfied with the only anti-comment-spam solution that then existed: Akismet (owned by Automattic/Wordpress). Your favorites bloggers such as Scoble were complaining that Akismet was blocking way too many legitimate comments and that he simply couldn't go through thousands of blocked comments a day to find the good ones. Other famous bloggers such as Marc Andreessen (if I remember correctly, I might be wrong) were also complaining and about to shut down comments on their blogs. We thought that was terrible and we wanted to fix that. And we did.

We basically built a product that was more efficient and easier to use than Akismet. Although we certainly didn't put Akismet out of business or grow anywhere near as big as they are, we forced them to improve their product in order to stay in the game. Later on, a 3rd contender joined the race: Mollom.

I believe that in many ways, we made the web a better place. In part because of us, user-generated content still flows freely on the web, you can still comment without too much hassle on your favorite blogs. Competition is good, and we created that in a stagnant but very critical market.

By the way, it wasn't easy. It was hell at times. But we didn't give up even when it made absolutely no sense to keep going. That's why we succeeded.

[lunaru]

The startup stories you're talking about are propagated because they appeal to a wider audience. People love lottery-level overnight success stories because that's something they can understand. Only the HN crowd can understand working just as hard, being just as passionate and only making a decent to "upper-class" living. That's not a sexy story.

That said, I don't think these types of startups don't get recognition. For example, who on HN doesn't know about patio11 and BCC? What about Peldi and Balsamiq? The stories are out there - we just choose to ignore them because Google and Facebook level is sexier.

Personally, I'm entering year three of my successful (to me) company. In fact, we just past the two year anniversary of taking our first credit card from our first subscriber and things are on the up and up. I'll be blogging about soon. Let's see how many people actually care to hear the story.

[patio11 → lunaru]

Congratulations, lunaru.

They would not appreciate publicity, but I have some buddies who could lose BCC in the petty cash drawer. A couple of them make products which don't sound all that much more lucrative than bingo cards.

There are a couple of self-made software entrepreneurs running around HN, too.

If you want to hear a lot of stories like this, come to Business of Software 2011 and ask anybody there what they do. The most common answer is "founded a software company which now employs X people and has revenues of Y million." (That crowd swings B2B more than my buddies.)

[feint]

Ok so I don't "live an upper class American lifestyle" (kind of sounds a tad boring) but I do travel the world living what I believe to be a pretty cool lifestyle.

And yes, getting here was very boring - I build Task.fm and a number of other apps. Bootstrapped them and worked with a virtual team to keep costs really low. I built my first site when I was 11 and I'm now just 22 so it took around 9-10 years of failures (aka really good learning experiences) to build a good app.

One thing I've discovered is Time is your friend. If you keep plugging away, moving forward, things do eventually become clearer and easier.

[andjones]

I think there are several start-ups which are boring and we don't hear about. I think I fit into this case and I'd love to hear other stories as well.

My startup at http://new.surveyshare.com is a tool where you can develop online surveys and collect results from people you know. Not glamorous, but people need it, and I am ramen profitable. However unglamorous, I am willing to continue working on it and enjoy it, which I think is the important part.

[dools]

What's your definition of a startup? What's your measure of success? There are many many tech businesses out there doing there thing helping people out with various computer bits n bobs. Some of these have offerings that are product-like or aiming towards being "packaged" offerings but transformation is slow, dependence on pevailing technology makes it hard to draw newsworthy points of difference and they operate in tiny pockets of an utterly enormous market. Are they start-ups?

They provide a service and receive money in return, feed their employees and pay their rent, and pay for the education of their children. Are they successful?

[gopi]

I never had a "exit" in the traditional sense but earned a lot of money (around 10-12 million EBITIDA) from several web projects in the last 5-6 years.

The funny thing is i am an immigrant with little coding skills, a lazy attitude and live in a big mid western city with almost zero tech startups!...BTB, i live a normal upper middle class life and my friends don't have a clue what i do!

[johnsto19 → gopi]

can you explain a little more about what web projects you worked on?

[gopi → johnsto19]

Some SEO projects in the beginning then some PPC projects and then a viral project...Sorry i cannot give details or names, hope you understand!

[ahoyhere]

Great question. I've been outlining an essay on "The boring way to success." Ha!

If I'd be more thrifty, I could stop working more than a few days a month. But I'm easily bored, I enjoy growing my business(es), and I really enjoy spending my money. Ex: my husband and I are about to get a second apartment, in another country.

My (first) bootstrapped SaaS is pulling in ~$140k/yr now based on monthlies, with 4x growth year over year, and I expect to do that again in the next 12 mos -- or possibly better, as network effects start to pick up. (http://letsfreckle.com -- you can't get less glorious than time tracking, on the face of it.)

Right now, my husband and a freelancer are in the other room, massaging the codebase to get our second SaaS up and running in dogfood mode. (http://charmde.sk)

I've combined a couple programming learning products (ebook, scripted workshops) and that adds another $130k or so a year of gross. I've also grossed about $65k in 2010 from teaching my fellow geeks how to create their own boring, but successful, products. (http://unicornfree.com/30x500 - now sold out)

Next year, I think I'll try to double the learning product numbers.

In short: I'm 26 now. I figure I can keep on building & have a small product portfolio that grosses $2m/yr by the time I'm 30… and I'll be able to call all the shots.

You might like my blog post on my income breakdown for 2010 so far:

http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/

The thing to realize about "the startup media" is that they are, essentially, tabloids. They cater to what people want to read, and what people want to read are fairy tales.